


Blessings Offered, Blessings Seized

by Canon_Is_Relative



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fluff, Idiots in Love, Love, M/M, Missing Scene, Mythology References, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pining, Poetry, Spoilers, don't read this if you haven't finished RoTT!, pov: kamet, spoilers for book 6: return of the thief
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:01:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 13,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27284614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: “Kamet.”I hummed but did not turn. I had re-folded this shirt so many times it would likely be worn thin from handling. He was only taking the one extra shirt. Only enough bread that a hungry man might eat in a day or two of wandering familiar hillsides. Only a short sword, small enough to be concealed in the pack he would carry until he was far enough away from our village that he could purchase a horse without the news of his flight reaching the ears of our neighbors.
Relationships: Kamet/Costis Ormentiedes
Comments: 15
Kudos: 58





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Wander With Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11840292) by [Canon_Is_Relative](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative). 



> Title comes from a line in the story ['Blessings Accepted and Blessings Deserved,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11851560) which was a gift fic written for me by Pendrecarc. In it, Kamet begins to translate a story of Immakuk and Ennnikar that he's never seen before. I was so taken by it that in chapter one of this story, I have Kamet quote five lines of text from the translation - all credit for those lines is due to Pendrecarc. 
> 
> This story picks up partway through the events of Return of the Thief, and follows Kamet and Costis through to the end of the book and slightly beyond. It stands alone, but it can be read as a sequel to another of my stories, ['Wander with Me'](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11840292), which shows them getting together. (For that matter it could also be read as a sequel to Pendrecarc's story that I linked to above, and either way you should definitely go read that story because it's wonderful.)
> 
> I have the prologue and five chapters written, with three more plotted out. I plan to update once or twice a week until the story is complete. Boundless thanks are due to my beta and best friend, stardust_made. Thank you for being my biggest fan, always.

“Kamet.”

I hummed but did not turn. I had re-folded this shirt so many times it would likely be worn thin from handling. He was only taking the one extra shirt. Only enough bread that a hungry man might eat in a day or two of wandering familiar hillsides. Only a short sword, small enough to be concealed in the day-pack he would carry until he was far enough away from the temples at Reyatimi that he could purchase a horse without the news of his flight from home reaching the ears of our neighbors. 

“Kamet.”

I took more of the dried meat from our stores and found room for it in the pack. It would leave very little for me and with most of our coin also leaving with him, it might be a very long time before I could get more for myself. I might never buy meat again.

“ _Kamet_.”

I turned at last away from his pack. It lay there on the table at my back, so small, absurdly small for the journey ahead, reproaching me with its inadequacy. I wiped my eyes and wiped them again, and still could make out no more than Costis’s blurry form, standing a few strides away from me across our small room. He would be out of my sight so quickly tomorrow morning, my wretched eyesight not even granting me the luxury of a long and painful leave-watching.

“Leave that for now. Come here.” Costis’s voice was low now, coaxing and soothing, and I went to him like a spooked horse running to the open arms of its handler.

“You will be careful,” I mumbled into his chest, my chapped lips catching on his rough cotton shirt. I spoke the words as a demand. I did not ask. I did not wish to hear him, my brave, intractable Attolian, admit to me that he would by necessity and by honor be placing the safety of his king and his country over his own. 

Three days. Three days since I’d heard the rumors. Two days since I’d heard enough to be convinced, down to my bones, that they were more than rumors. _Always_ , Godekker had said. I was no longer a slave, but I still understood rumor better than any free man. Better than Costis, who until an hour ago had still been trying to pacify me by saying he might be back in a few day’s time, the rumors come to nothing after all. When at last my beloved idiot had seen that his reassurances were only distressing me further, he’d fallen silent, left me to the obsessive packing and repacking of his bag as, behind me, he sat by our glowing hearth and sharpened the swords he was leaving behind. 

Now, he held me in his arms and let me press my ear to his chest. His steady arms around me and his beating heart against my cheek were the only reassurance I would ask for or accept.


	2. Three Days Earlier

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes: this chapter contains sap and fluff and mush. But I truly believe that it is well-earned sap and fluff and mush. These boys have been through _a lot,_ okay, with more to come, and I think we deserve a moment to celebrate how wonderful and improbable it is that they found each other in the midst of it all.

“I can’t believe we’ve been here for a year.”

Costis seemed to pluck the words from my head even as I was plucking pits from the olives. They were wrinkled and small, and still they were the finest we’d seen since settling in these remote hills. I knew how much Costis missed his home, and I’d promised an exorbitant amount last month to one of the traders who planned to pass through Attolia before returning to Roa. He’d arrived just that morning, finding me as I made my way to the temple, and I’d been so delighted that I turned right around on the dusty path and made my way back home, hoping to catch Costis still dawdling around our little garden. He’d been waiting out the morning to see what the weather would bring before making his way into the hills. It was time for him to visit his furthest observation point again, and if he’d left already I might not see him for days, so I hurried.

And was rewarded for my hurry by the sight of him there, with dirt on his knees and under his nails, surprised and then pleased to see me back. He agreed to my plan without the smallest hesitation and, giddy as schoolboys who’d given our tutors the slip, we took a blanket, some cheese and smoked fish, a soft loaf and the hard olives, and went off to waste the morning in our favorite grove.

I could not believe that we’d been here long enough to have a favorite grove. Long enough that the ancient trees around us felt like old friends and the pitiful olives like a royal treat. Long enough that shirking our duties for a day seemed like a well-earned holiday and no matter of national import, certainly no matter of life and death. 

I felt a moment’s disquiet as I sat still, the warm sun filtering down around us, the ever-present wind turned back by the grove of trees and only reminding us that it reigned supreme out in the open by rattling the leaves overhead. Could we really have grown so soft, I wondered, after little more than a year?

And then Costis spoke the words aloud and seemed to break my uneasy spell. Lying with his head in my lap, he squinted one eye open when I didn’t answer him, and then opened his mouth like a baby bird. I placed a pitted olive on his tongue and he chewed it slowly, savoring, eyes drooping lazily shut again. I brushed the hair back from his forehead. I trimmed it for him occasionally, but it had been awhile and it was so long that he could now tie the whole lot of it back at the nape of his neck. I thought it suited him. When I told him that he laughed at me and said that when he was old and bald I’d probably say _that_ suited him as well. I ducked my head to brush my lips over his forehead and reminded him that by the time he was bald I would certainly be blind, and it wouldn’t matter what he looked like. Laughing, he caught at the back of my neck, pulling me down to kiss me soundly, laughing again when the half-empty bowl of olives rolled into the grass as I tumbled down beside him on the blanket.

“O, Immakuk, wise Immakuk,” Costis wheedled me, much later. I huffed and rolled over, attempting to hide my face from him. I didn’t have much success, as his chest was my only hiding place. The callouses on his large hands raised goose pimples on my back, until his fingers curled around my hip.

I groaned and raised myself onto one elbow, looking down at him. His fair hair was a tangled mess, slicked back from his forehead — and yes, that suited him as well, as it left his bright eyes shining up at me. His chest, still flushed, rose and fell unevenly as he laughed silently at me.

“You are insatiable,” I informed him primly.

“And you are the soul of temperance,” he grinned.

“First you use your wicked tongue to make me forget my own name,” I chided, “and then you use it to beg me for a story?”

“Well, yes,” my Costis said, sounding for all the world like he was in the marketplace explaining why such and such a price was really quite reasonable. “I know how much you like to be useful, Kamet, and how much you enjoy being appreciated.” He had slowly drawn me down to his level, and was now speaking between kisses and gentle nips to my cheek and jaw. “And you know how much I... appreciate... your talented... tongue.” He pulled back far enough to grin at me, and if I’d had something to throw at him, I would have.

Midday was giving way to afternoon, and with the breeze finding its way into the grove it was too cool for us to be lying around naked. We helped each other back into our clothes — me almost wishing to be out of them again after he so-attentively laced up my trousers; the passion that rose in me whenever he bent his knee like a servant to help me with a task, which had so shocked me when first I felt it, had not abated over these many months — and after gathering up the olives that had not been ruined in the dirt, I tapped my fingers to my lips. I knew the story he wanted to hear. 

I had told it to him only rarely. It was not one that I had translated at my writing desk in Attolia, or later in my alcove back in the empire, separated from my master only by a curtain. It had come to me here in Roa by way of the Magus of Sounis, copied in an almost illegible hand to boot, and I had no books or scrolls to reference as I worked on it. I’d translated it roughly into Attolian as soon as I received it, but making it scan had been a more difficult task. For some reason, each time I took it up Costis was fascinated. He always wanted to know what prompted me to choose this word or that, equally interested whether the change was a cosmetic one, or the result of insight that brought new meaning to the passage.

“On the road Ennikar learned about  
Blessings seized and blessings offered.  
Hungered and thirsted, Strong Ennikar,  
Found himself lonely, Handsome Ennikar,  
Who had known feasts of meat and wine...”

There I paused long enough to poke Costis in the ribs with a pointed look. He pressed a hand to his chest, the picture of innocence, and I shook my head even as I felt a smile bloom on my face. I continued, telling how Handsome Ennikar made his way to Cassa’s hives, stole the honey that he found there, journeyed onward. With my beautiful Costis at my side, the stories of Handsome Ennikar always seemed doubly moving and horrendously inadequate, both. 

_If I had the talent of a poet,_ I sometimes thought, gazing at him...

“With a rock for their feast-table, the moon for their lamp,  
Learned Ennikar that a blessing shared is a blessing savored.  
Shared with his friend, honey-smeared, shared a lover’s portion—”

“I remember the first time I heard you speak that line.” Costis’s voice was so low and so soft, not really an interruption, that I might have continued in my recitation. But, pressed against him as I was, I’d felt the vibration of his words in my own chest, and fell silent. “You were working on the translation, muttering to yourself, I don’t think you even knew I was listening. You said the words in Mede and I thought I’d misunderstood you.”

I remembered. I’d grown used to working in the evenings with the sounds of Costis pottering around behind me. I hadn’t been paying him the least attention until all of his noise stopped in an instant.

I looked up into his face, and sudden insight told me that had I dared to turn and look at him then, I’d have seen the same expression on his face that he wore now.

“That was when I realized, Kamet.” A blush overcame his features and he ducked his head to rub the back of his neck. I’d had him in my mouth not an hour ago but this — _this_ was what made him blush. He spoke the next words to my knees. “I already knew quite clearly that I would die for you. But until that moment, I didn’t know...what else that meant.”

I couldn’t help it, I reached over to pinch his cheek. He hissed in surprise and I beamed at him. “That was when you realized that you were nothing but a lovesick fool from a fireside story, miraculously brought to life?”

“Yes,” he admitted, rubbing his cheek. “And I haven’t regretted it a single day since. I may be a fool, but I am committed to my path. If you found yourself trapped in the underworld, Kamet, I would cheat Death of his oil and anoint your head to bring you back into the sunlight.” 

I was amused that he was taking his cues from the old stories from my part of the world, rather than his own, so I teased, “That seems like a great deal more effort than simply eating the pomegranate seeds and staying in the underworld with me.” 

Costis smiled, but only shook his head. Afraid that I had broken the mood, I quickly carried on with my recitation. I’d recently finished a draft of the entire story that I was quite happy with, and was amply rewarded for my efforts, as I always was, with my lover’s undivided attention. And, as he had ever since that first time, he thanked me politely when I’d finished.

It was too late in the day for Costis to set out after that, but there was still enough daylight that I decided to stop in at the temple on our way back from the grove and see to a few things. That’s when I was told that the merchant who’d brought my olives had spent most of the day on the temple porch, sharing the gossip he’d collected along his circuitous route up from the coast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A reminder that the lines that Kamet recites, from "On the road..." to "...feasts of meat and wine" are from [this story by Pendrecarc](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11851560), which I highly encourage you to read! The idea of Immakuk and Ennikar being lovers is something I explore in the prequel to this story, [Wander With Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11840292).
> 
> I plan to post the next installment on Saturday. Thank you for your kudos and comments!


	3. Three Days Later

“It was a gift,” Costis said, when at last I had run myself out of regrets and self-reproach and fell silent. I could not believe we’d been so stupid as to forget the wider world beyond us, to forget that we were not who we pretended to be. I could not believe that I had been caught so off-guard by our call to duty.

He bent to deliver his next words directly into my ear, his breath on my skin making me shiver. “I had a dream, four nights ago. A woman offered me a honey-comb, still dripping. I took it from her and she smiled. Told me that it was a double portion, meant to be shared and savored.”

“Cassa,” I breathed against his chest, and then looked up. His eyes were shining, sincere, and he nodded.

“I didn’t remember the dream until you came back home with the olives that morning, and then I heard her voice in my head again. A memory, or...” We both sent our eyes heavenward for a moment; his ‘or’ did not need to be said. “‘Blessings seized and blessings offered,’” he quoted from the story he’d asked for that afternoon in the grove, and said again, more firmly, “It was a gift, that day. Learning of the Mede army half a day earlier would have made no difference. Stealing half a day with you to forget the outside world is a gift I will carry with me when I leave tomorrow, and treasure always.” 

I lay my hands on his chest and felt his strong, steady heart beating right into my palms. He let me lead him to our bed.

“I will go east,” his voice was a mere rumble in his chest, his eyes half closed. We had been talking for hours but still he held me, laying out his plans. “I will make for my observation point above the Perentides gorge, and see what I can see. From there I can make for the main road easily enough, buy a horse and make good time to the Leonyla pass, and south to Attolia. It will be hard riding, but I can do it. I can cover ground openly as a messenger could not.”

Indeed, as a messenger _had_ not. Relius’s overland messenger was overdue by almost a week. A trivial amount of time, considering the roads this time of year. And yet, and yet... 

I wished for the hundredth time that day that I had any skill with a horse so that I could go with him, but I hadn’t put my seat in a saddle in almost two years. That was high on my list of self-recriminations; why hadn’t I insisted that we buy a horse as soon as we arrived in Roa? Costis could have been giving me riding lessons all this time, instead of forcing me to learn how to swing his gods-accursed sword. 

But idle wishes were beyond useless now and the idea of me leaving with him had not been suggested by either of us. For one thing, if we left together it would be noticed at once. We would have to watch our backs from the moment we left the village, and while I am not half as useless as I was when Costis and I first travelled together, we both knew that I would never be able to sustain the pace.

“They will know,” I said into the dark, voicing my fears at last. “Before you have been gone a week, the whole village will have worked it out.” 

“They may not. They are used to my comings and goings by now.”

I could only shake my head. Half a dozen people had seen my face when I first heard the reports of the temporary markets springing up in anticipation of supplying ‘our neighbors’ along their route. And once my Attolian disappeared, all those who’d come to accept him, even to like him, would remember the half-fanciful suspicions they’d entertained when he first arrived in their village – the scribe’s companion with a soldier’s scars. And while I always did my best to conceal them, I knew that my flogging scars had been noticed. We would be betrayed. By a friend, or a neighbor, or the leather merchant who still thought Costis had cheated him last winter. By accident or ill-will, we would be betrayed. 

“I will come back for you.” Costis rolled to face me, and the weight of his arm around me was a comfort I did not know how I could live without. “You know the way to the hut in the valley. If I can, I will buy more provisions and leave them there for you when I double back for the west road. But you should make your way there soon, go tomorrow before anyone suspects that I am away for more than a day, and see that everything is in order. Be ready to fly the moment suspicious eyes turn on you. I will return for you and we will make our plans from there.”

If love of me has turned Costis into a fool, my love for him has made me a coward. I could not say what I knew that I should say. I could not bring it into the open. If war was coming, then Costis’s place was with his king on the field of battle, not with me. Opposing a force of seventy thousand Mede soldiers, the Little Peninsula could not — would not — spare a man of Costis’s skill. For what? To play personal body guard to an escaped slave of no value to anyone but him? I had served my purpose for Attolia. I could be of no more use to her, and neither was I a danger to her if the Medes got their hands on me. 

No. I knew that Costis would not be returned to me. I knew that I would not see him again. Not unless he survived the war. And I survived the Medes. But, coward though I might have been, I would never ask my lover to turn traitor. This was why we had come to Roa - to serve Attolia. It might have seemed for a day that we had come to this little windswept temple town for the sole purpose of falling in love, but we had each made our commitments with our eyes open. 

_Eugenides and his ‘suggestions.’_

Away from the capital, away from the daily evidence of the king’s insane and ingenious machinations, my faith in my own memory of him had begun to wane. But Costis’s never did, and it was in Costis that all my faith lay. It was into Costis’s face that I smiled now; no more talking, no more planning, no more doubt or recrimination or useless dreaming. Costis, the truest star in my sky by which all others were ordered; the vessel for my own heart. On my elbows and knees above him, my poor, meager body like a shield I offered up to the gods for his defense, I kissed my Costis as though with the sealing of our lips I could pour my own life force into him. Send him into battle with both our souls to keep his body safe. 

He touched me, as he had done that first time all those months ago, as though I were a sacred relic, too precious to trust in his care. I reminded him that I was not so easily broken, and when he touched me again it was to give me what I needed from him. All the power in his body, which would soon be turned to the service of his king, was mine for that night.


	4. Chapter 4

We were not betrayed. Not in the first week of his absence, at any rate. My talk of betrayal on our final night together had put an idea into Costis’s head; a brutal but effective idea, it kept me safe far longer than I’d have dreamed.

Three days after Costis left, the farmer whose land lay downhill to the north came with his eldest son to the village the evening before market day. It was unusual for him to come himself, he usually sent his son and daughter-in-law with their produce, and the fact that he came himself and that he brought less than he usually did was cause for much grumbling and gossip among my cohorts at the temple. The farmer was unknown to me, except by his name — Mehter — but Costis knew him well. He had worked Mehter’s fields the summer before, and occasionally gone to visit him over the winter. Now, when we happened to cross paths as I was passing through the market square with Ameena, I saw the man whom Costis had considered a friend give me such a look that, accompanied by the comment he made to his son, was enough to make my ears flush hot.

Only my many years’ experience as a slave kept me from responding with my fists. But my experience of living the last year in this village as a respected scholar and free man would not let me simply walk on as though I, and dozens of my neighbors, had not just heard what he said. Recovering from my stunned silence I suggested, as though speaking only to my friend, that we ought to make allowances for such vulgarity coming from someone who so obviously preferred the company of his own swine.

There was a smattering of uncomfortable laughter – I was not known for my cutting remarks and my delivery was awkward – and I had already turned away when I heard him call out, “Perhaps little Kay would like to take one of my pigs off my hands, now that he is sleeping alone!” My chin came up at that, but I refused to turn and be drawn in again. I left the market quickly and went home, already putting the pieces together. I knew the gossip mill would be running at full speed, but it was several days before I screwed up my courage to ask Ameena what else she had heard after I left.

She had lived in the village all her life, but like me Ameena was a newcomer to the temple on the heights. Left destitute when her husband died, she was now in charge of overseeing the education of the acolytes, and was my closest friend among the temple workers. When I decided it would be dangerous for me to ignore the rumors any longer, I brought a jug of wine and two cups to her office and asked her not to spare my feelings but tell me what was being said about Costis’s sudden departure.

She looked sad, but she did not mince words, as I had known she would not.

“Mehter says that Costis came to his farm, asking to buy a horse so that he could ride out and meet the Mede party.” I could have both laughed and cried to hear her call it a ‘party’, as though it were a few hunters and their dogs that advanced on Attolia. “He says that Costis told him there is a woman who will be among them. That if he can find her, and if she will have him back, then he...” she faltered for the first time, and the pity on her face soured the wine in my mouth. “Kay, he says that if he finds this woman, he will not need you to play housewife to him any longer.”

Between the strong wine and her naked sympathy I knew my face was flushed and I added a tremor to my hand as I reached again for my wine cup, shrugging off her condolence and trying not to think of anything at all, lest my relief and my admiration for Costis’s brilliant plan show on my face.

It’s been said that the simplest explanation is the most satisfactory, and I watched that axiom play out over the next month. 

Those who knew me best, the other temple workers, drew around me in silent support, but I suspected that most of the villagers were laughing behind their hands. Ameena visited me often at my house, which now seemed both silent and huge, bringing this child or that for my help with their lessons and cooking for me while I tried, distractedly, to hammer some sense into the minds of her most difficult pupils. I think that she was trying to make me feel like a man, asking my help and advice and performing womanly tasks for me, and before long I could see that what had begun as an errand of mercy turned to genuine interest on her part. I did appreciate her company, and contrived to show just enough interest in return to keep her hopeful, but she was a shield and I was using her without mercy to protect myself from what was coming. 

When the time of the expected market in Put approached, the first Mede scout was sighted near the village. 

I had been sticking close to home, keeping to my house and the temple and the well-worn path between, ears always pricked for the sound of approaching riders, or a stranger’s voice in a too-familiar accent. I was working on one of the Enoclitus scrolls that day, truly lost in my work for the first time since Costis left, when I heard the commotion at the door. An acolyte, a young boy I knew from his visits with Ameena, was telling his friends what he’d overheard in the square. 

Bounty hunters. In addition to paying good coin for livestock and grain, the approaching army had brought along bounty hunters. The more the boy talked, the clearer the image in my mind of the empire’s great grasping hands reaching to crush the Little Peninsula even as clever fingers combed the countryside for escaped slaves — “and other reprobates,” the boy added. His excitement, infectious to his mates, made my stomach turn.

It was not the only news of the Medes that day, and I had to trust that I would not sound as obvious as I felt when I told Ameena that I could not endure the constant barrage of gossip that only reminded me of how much I’d lost, and was going to stay at home for a few days until our friends found something new to talk about. I ached for Costis and I let it show on my face, along with the guilt that my repayment for her kindness was to burden her with her my longing for the lover who had abandoned me. But she squeezed my hand and helped me bundle up my tools, holding the back door open for me to slip out of the temple unnoticed. That evening as twilight fell, I left the home that I had shared with Costis and made my way up into the hills, across one ridge and down into the next valley to the abandoned shepherd’s hut that we had set up months ago to be our safe house. 

Many weeks later I would learn that Nahuseresh had discovered I was in Roa, and that on the battlefield he had taunted the high king by claiming to have had me tortured and killed. Some say that it was to avenge me that Eugenides led the astonishingly foolhardy attack which was the allied army’s first small victory at Leonyla. Costis is one of very few who actually believes that absurd story, and I love him for it. I am, likewise, eternally grateful that my beloved was not present to hear my former master make the claim that he had chopped me to pieces. How Nahuseresh learned of my whereabouts is a mystery, but hardly a surprise. Perhaps someone from our village betrayed me on purpose. Perhaps the bounty hunters simply hit on the right questions to ask. I will never know for sure.


	5. Chapter 5

There were precious few roads open to me, once I had fled the village to shelter in the shepherd’s hut. Although in truth, I had as many options as I’d ever had when I was fleeing the empire with Costis and meaning to leave him at every turn. If I could make my way northeast to the town of Chut, there was a good road to carry me out of Roa. I could follow that road all way to the capital of Magyar and find work as a scribe. Or, as I had once thought of doing, join a caravan heading north and take my chances in Mur. 

I had everything I would need for the journey, and was not overly worried about meeting danger on the road once Roa was behind me. Costis and I each had two sets of very fine clothes, parting gifts from Eugenides, which we had rarely worn as they were far too fine for everyday life in the village. They were expertly done, and I am sure that The King Who Thinks of Everything — as I had amused Costis by calling him more than once — had a hand in the tailor’s every decision. Not flashy in the least, the cut and color of the garments would not draw the eye. But anyone who knew anything would see how fine the fabric and the workmanship was. There were coats as well, in the continental style which would be fashionable everywhere and give no hint as to the origin either of its tailor or its wearer, while my high-necked shirts would expose no glimpse of the flogging scars on my back and shoulders. 

I had brought all of them with me to the shepherd’s hut, though they made an awkward bundle. My own would allow me to pass easily as a merchant or scribe. Costis’s I could sell or trade for passage all the way to Oncevar, if I decided that even Mur was too close to the Empire for comfort. I had my pens, tablets and scrolls. I had Costis’s two swords and one of his long knives. I had my wits, my experience, and my determination never to fall into the hands of the Mede Empire again.

I also had a sense I could not shake of being back in Godekker’s garbage pit. 

_If I left, I would never know if the Attolian lived or died._

I could not stay where I was. The tiny hut was too close to the village; if the bounty hunters came looking for me, they would find me. I would have to move soon, but the only place I wanted to go was the one place I absolutely could not venture, not with two armies sweeping towards each other on the road and bounty hunters combing every inch the backlands between. I would not be safe until I left Roa, but I could not leave Roa until I knew the outcome of the war between Attolia and the Medes. Even if it was just to hear that Costis had marched into battle and not returned. When I knew what his fate was, then I could decide on my own. 

I decided that I would make for the capital city of Roa. Though a far cry from a cosmopolitan melting pot like Ianna-Ir, I would still be only one of many foreigners within its walls and with my fine clothes and obvious qualifications, I thought it unlikely that any casual observer would connect me with a bounty hunter’s inquiries after an escaped Setran slave. Unless, of course, I was spotted by someone who actually knew me. Or the king of Roa decided to curry favor with the Empire and gave blanket permission for all foreigners to be rounded up and questioned. Or until the Mede army, after crushing Attolia, turned on their one-time allies and lay siege to the city. Barring any of those large or small catastrophes, each of which seemed more likely the more I turned them over in my mind, the plan was sound. Once in the capital I could sell one of the swords or Costis’s clothes for ready coin to rent a room where I would hope to pass unnoticed while I waited to hear news from Attolia. 

I couldn’t risk a lamp in the hut let alone a cook fire, so I spent my first few days in isolation eating the fresh food I’d brought and venturing outside only to fetch water from the spring and visit the makeshift latrine. All the while I was making and unmaking my plans. When the bread and vegetables were gone I set grain to soak in a pot, making unappetizing lumpy cakes out of the mush and shuddering when my long-buried memories of the Setran slavers would not be repressed. One morning I broke the seal on a jar of pickled vegetables and added them to the grain. It tasted foul, but then everything had tasted like ash in my mouth since I fled. I told myself to count my blessings that I was not indeed eating the dust and clay of the grey lands, and made myself eat more than I wanted. I had decided at last to leave for the city, and I would need my strength and my wits about me; the most dangerous leg of my journey would be the day or two it would take to cross overland before meeting the Capital Road. I would be leaving when the sun set, taking advantage of the cover of dark and my familiarity with the nearby territory. 

I began to pack, but before I’d done more than re-roll the fine clothing in its wrapping, a pain in my stomach began to nag at me. I pushed through it, telling myself it was only my nerves, until it was too late and I was vomiting my breakfast back into the pot I’d made it in.

I was dying, I was quite sure of it. I opened my eyes to oppressive darkness and for a while I thought I was back in the lion’s den. Then I woke enough to remember that the pain was in my stomach, not in my head, and thought that I must be racing towards my death in Attolia on board the Dolphin, for what else could explain the roiling in my belly. But if that were the case, where was Costis, to sit with me and try to soothe me, in his clumsy way? 

Where was Costis? 

I had a sense of time passing, and soon enough there was light beyond my closed eyelids. I had missed my time, I was supposed to be gone from this place. The air was close and stinking, and I knew that was my fault as well, as I rolled onto my side and heaved as though my body was trying to eject not just the contents of my stomach but the stomach itself. Oblivion beckoned and I tried to reach for it, knowing that the only way to find relief from the pain of dying was to pay my two coins and surrender to the journey. 

At the edge of my cloudy consciousness, I heard the low, clear notes of a roller bird’s call. And that was when I knew that I had died, indeed. For I had remembered by then that I was in a shepherd’s hut on the heights, in a country where no roller bird had ever come to make its nest. I had taught their call to Costis, how to imitate it by blowing across the knuckles of his cupped hands. We’d used it as a signal between us, to find each other when we’d wandered out of sight up here in these hills. 

So, so, so. Death had found Costis before he found me, and now my love was calling, calling to me, calling me to join him on his journey to the underworld. 

I thought of Costis’s face, so beautiful in the sunlight, smile glinting, his laugh sweet and free in the open air. On a sob that wracked the last of the strength from my already-wrecked body, I succumbed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've slowed down on posting as I'm afraid of outpacing what I have ready to go /0\ Also this chapter and the previous used to be one and I split them up...which in retrospect doesn't seem very fair as nothing much happened in either of them :) Sorry about that -- action resumes in the next chapter, which I plan to post this weekend! Cheers.


	6. Chapter 6

When I opened my eyes, I was in darkness once again. But it was not the impenetrable black of endless night; a shivery, silvery light made patterns above my head, peaceful to look at. I watched them for a while, until the sound of breath and movement to my left startled me and I turned sharply, making my head spin.

“Kamet. Are you awake?”

Once before I had thought him a ghost. Then he had been coated in flour, glowing in the moonlight. Moonlight rested on his features now, as well, and on his hands as they reached for me. 

“Costis.” My voice sounded like wind through a broken reed. 

“Yes,” he whispered, stroking my face. “Yes, it’s me.”

A moment later his hands were gone, replaced by a blessed coolness. Liquid rolled from my forehead and dripped into my eyes, but I didn’t care.

“You stole the oil,” I murmured, nonsensical, reaching for him and finding his shirt, twisting my fingers in it while he patted my forehead with the damp cloth.

“And you, you idiot,” his voice was gruff but I could tell it was close to breaking. “I thought you’d eaten the pomegranate.”

The next time I was sensible, Costis coaxed me to lean into his arms, propping me up enough to dribble some water into my parched mouth. Then I felt his blunt fingers at my lips, and with an effort that felt monumental, poked my tongue out to taste what he was offering me. Honey. Sweet and pure and redolent of the sunshine and flowers of Attolia. If I’d had the strength, I would have wept. 

When I woke again it was full daylight outside, though there was a scrap of cloth tacked across the window to keep the light from falling into my eyes. Blinking, I pushed myself up on my elbows and looked around. Costis was gone. Only the sight of his pack by the door and his cloak draped over the back of the one chair kept me from believing that he’d been an apparition sent to me in the night. My stomach felt hollowed out and my throat scraped raw, but I was clear-headed enough to realize that I had not died, and that the sound of the roller bird’s call had been Costis signaling his return to me. I wondered how much time had passed since then. 

When Costis ducked through the low door and saw me sitting up, he put down his bucket so quickly it sloshed water over the side. He dropped to his knees at my bedside, searching my face, laying his fingers to my forehead. I let him nanny me without comment, too busy reacquainting myself with the sight of him. 

“How are you?” he finally asked, and when I said, “Better,” he let out a rush of air and sagged forward, his head dropping to my knee. I buried my fingers in his hair and he stayed there, trembling, for a long breath in and out.

“My God,” he whispered when he lifted his head to look at me. “Kamet, you scared the hell out of me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and winced to think of the sight —the smell — that must have met him when he opened the door to find me collapsed on the floor or the bed, I could not remember which. There was no sign now that anything had been amiss, my Costis having dutifully cleaned up the mess and aired out the little room while I slept.

Costis was shaking his head. “Don’t apologize. I thought you’d been poisoned.”

“Only by Mehter’s poor husbandry.” I rolled my eyes to where I’d seen the jar of pickled vegetables that had been my last meal before my trip halfway to the underworld and back. I’d recognized the farmer’s mark in the wax of the seal; I’d apparently been too distracted to see that the seal itself had gone bad.

Costis looked stricken. He’d bought those jars from Mehter at the same time as the horse, left some of them in the hut for me to find and taken some for himself. Which god had reached down, I wondered, and directed his hand? If he’d been taken ill on the road, the Mede might have arrived at Attolia’s doorstep before anyone brought word. 

Costis helped me out of bed and helped me to dress – I hadn’t realized until I tried to stand that I’d been lying there naked but for the blanket wrapped around me. I leaned on Costis’s arm and we went outside, where I got my first good look at him in the sunlight; what I’d taken for a trick of the shadows indoors was not my imagination at all. Catching me staring, Costis grimaced and tugged self-consciously on his hair, now unmistakably several shades darker than when he had left. “Relius,” he said by way of explanation. “He said that if I insisted on traveling openly, I could at least look less like an Attolian.” 

Costis walked with me first to the latrine and then to the spring where he left me sitting on a rock to dry myself in the sun, a stone’s throw away from where my clothes and bedding were also laid out and nearly dry. He told me that he’d hobbled his horse just down the hill where she could drink and graze to her heart’s content, and disappeared down the rocky slope where the little creek dropped in a small but lovely waterfall. 

I was watching the sun play in the mist that rose from the fall, enjoying the uncomplicated feeling of being alive on a beautiful day, when I slowly became aware that what I was seeing was not only the mist of the waterfall, but also a thin tower of pale woodsmoke. From even a little farther away it would have been indistinguishable from the mist, and it dwindled away to nothing almost as soon as I recognized what I was looking at. A minute later Costis reappeared, leading a sturdy-looking mare, carrying a pot of stew and two large skewers of cooked meat. I grinned at him and shook my head, my chest swelling with the sudden, absurd wish to have our entire village gathered around us to witness the loyalty, and the genius, of this man who loved me.

“The honey is from Brinna,” Costis said, cutting off another piece from the comb and passing it to me on the end of his knife. “And I’m to tell you that there will be whole platters full of nutcakes when you return to visit them.”

“Whole platters, just for me?”

“As many as you can eat.” 

“I seem to have become a hero in my absence. Has someone been telling stories of me, I wonder?”

Costis refused to look ashamed of himself, and I wondered aloud how many nutcakes _he_ had eaten, wasting time in the kitchens while I languished alone in Roa.

I felt so much better, the memory of how ill I had been taking on that air of unreality that sickness often does. Costis, I could see, was still shaken, but I was already having difficulty believing that it had been as bad as all that. Another day of rest, bland stew, and Attolian honey and it would be forgotten. 

“Brinna sent Zerchus out to fetch the honeycomb,” Costis continued after a minute, eyes fixed on the piece of beeswax that he was molding between his forefinger and thumb. “He asked after you as well, said to tell you that one of his hives had swarmed the week before and he found them nesting under the eaves of one of the kitchen bunkhouses; right outside Semiux’s room.”

I laughed, surprised and gratified to learn that Zerchus remembered I had been present on that memorable day when Semiux – brash, cheeky Semiux who was convinced that half the kitchen was in love with him – had fallen into a hive while trying to steal a piece of comb. The memory of him as he came screeching in from the garden, tearing off his clothes as he went, was as vivid as if it had all happened yesterday.

More news followed. Cameon had been careless with one of Driumix’s knives and lost a finger. Little Mesha had finished his apprenticeship and was now lauded as one of the best saucemakers in the kitchen. Tarra had finally married her sweetheart from the stables and, as she was now in such a way that she could say what she liked without being accused of flirting, had commented with great approval on Costis’s long hair. It was surprisingly sweet to hear their names again. I’d corresponded with Relius, and Costis had received a few letters from his friend Aristogiton, but neither of them had mentioned anyone from the kitchens. 

“Tarra is as big as a house but she’s still rolling the finest pastry for their majesties’ table,” Costis added. “She’ll stay, and so will Brinna, but Driumix is leaving with the army, along with half the spit-boys and gods know how many of the others.”

His silence was meditative; mine was tense. It was not the first time Costis had broached the subject of his country’s preparations for war and each time he did I wondered if he would at last tell me why he had come back instead of joining ranks with them.

When his silence stretched on, I cleared my throat. “What do the cooks and the servants think about this business of war?”

Costis lifted one shoulder. “The boys are excited. The old men are resigned.” A small, crooked smile visited his face. “To a one, they trust the king.”

I nodded, but my face must have showed my disquiet. Costis watched me pensively, then looked down, squashing the piece of wax flat between his fingers. He began to impress lines on it with his thumbnail as he spoke. “Aris’s squad still serves the king, and the king has agreed that he will not fight alongside his soldiers. So it is very likely that Aris will not join the battle either. He is…not pleased, at the thought of holding back. And I understand, if I were in his shoes, I’d feel the same. But since I’m not, and believe me I didn’t tell him this, I can’t help but be relieved.”

Costis studied the marks he’d made in the wax, then balanced it on his thumbnail and flipped it like a coin. Poorly weighted, it wobbled in the air and fell onto the blanket by my knee. I picked it up off the bed and offered it to him, but he was looking out the window at the little sliver of blue sky beyond. After a moment he said quietly, “It was very good to see him again. And Teleus.”

I swallowed and withdrew my offering hand, cradling the wax coin in my palms and speaking to it instead of to Costis. “I’m surprised that Teleus allowed you to leave.”

Costis’s chin came up and he looked sharply at me. “It wasn’t Teleus’s decision.”

I didn’t say, _Whose, then?_ but my silence must have been eloquent because his brows immediately drew down and he said, “You blame me for coming back for you, instead of marching with my king.”

I did. “I did not expect you to return.” He looked stubbornly at me. He knew there was more, and he sat waiting for me to say it, so I did. “I expected you to do your duty to your country.”

He was quiet for only a moment, while I held my breath. “The queen herself suggested it would be the best course of action, that I be released from the guard and return to keep you safe.”

That was the last thing I’d expected to hear.

He nodded firmly. And then he blushed.

“What?” I had to ask him several times, but eventually he told me in a few halting phrases: it seemed that, in front of an embarrassing number of ministers as well as the current and former secretaries of the archives, the Queen of Attolia had said that they would not order Costis to stay with the guard so long as his heart remained in Roa. 

“Well,” I said, fighting the temptation to hold my hands up to his ears as one might warm oneself over a bonfire. “Relius will not have been surprised, but on your next visit to the kitchen you’ll likely get more teasing than honey.”

Costis’s chin jutted forward and he refused to break eye contact as he said solemnly, “Attolia owes you a debt that must be repaid; you are owed whatever protection my king and queen can afford. As we are at war they can afford very little, but I am a loyal soldier and servant of my country and I am here to uphold Attolia’s commitment to you. The preservation of your life is my most sacred, patriotic duty.”

I wondered how often he had practiced those words. If he had pictured the king as he prepared them, or me. If he’d ever delivered them to the king then he’d left out that part of the story, so I had to imagine Eugenides’s reaction for myself. They were good words, they might even have been true, but not even Costis could make them sound anything but overblown and ridiculous. 

I held on to my placid expression for as long as I could. It wasn’t long.


	7. Chapter 7

I woke gasping for breath, pinned down in the dark. Long force of habit kept me from thrashing out, and the weight across my chest quickly resolved itself into Costis’s arm, flung across me in sleep.

The bed we slept on was both narrow and short. Costis had to lie with his knees tucked up, which left precious little space for me on the thin mattress, but neither of us had suggested he take the floor. Costis shifted now, half-waking, and mumbled something wordless but vaguely inquiring.

“Go back to sleep,” I murmured, sliding out from under his arm and placing my bare feet carefully on the hard-packed floor. I would have thought a soldier would be better at doing as he was told, but predictably Costis pushed himself upright, blinking sleep from his eyes and asking if I wanted him to come with me. I pressed a silencing kiss to his lips, and slipped from the hut.

The moon was a day or two off from full and the valley lay in an eerie parody of noontime brightness. I made my way slowly back uphill from the latrine, enjoying the cool night air on my skin, thinking of nothing. The Attolian – I still, sometimes, caught myself calling him that in my head – was leaning against the side of the hut, his face tipped up to the sky. I came to stand beside him, his body a reassuringly solid warmth at my side. 

“The moon is so bright I can’t make out the end of Hephestia’s staff,” Costis murmured after a while, hand sketching the outline of the familiar constellation, the one I’d grown up calling The Shepherd. 

“I’ve lost count of the days,” I said. “Will it be full tomorrow, or the day after?”

“Tomorrow.” Costis shifted his weight, pressing closer to me. “How long were you ill before I arrived?”

I cast my mind back, trying to make sense of my scattered memories. “Not long. Only a day, I think. Did you look for me at home, first?”

In the moonlight I watched Costis’s brow furrow, and then smooth as he realized that I meant our house in the village. “No. It was midday when I arrived, I planned to check the hut and then make my way to the village after dark if you weren’t here.”

“Ah,” I said, smiling. “You didn’t want to be seen creeping home to your ‘little housewife’, then?”

Costis ducked his head, then turned and buried his face against my hair, one strong arm coming around me in the dark. “I hated saying those things to him,” he murmured. “I’m sorry.”

I pulled him down for a kiss, intending to tell him off for apologizing for a job well done, but before I could say anything he went on, “I’m sorry that I didn’t let you in on the plan. I wish I could say that it was because I didn’t think of it until after I left, but really…”

“You knew I was not a good enough actor to play along with such a plan, if I’d known about it in advance? You’re right. Half the people in the market saw me rise to his bait. I don’t think I could have responded to him as I did if I’d known to expect it. No one questioned my role as the jilted lover after that.”

He stiffened, his arm tightening around me. “What did that bastard say to you?”

I shook my head. “I can’t remember, and it doesn’t matter. It was a brilliant plan. No one suspected you as a spy and rode after you, and no one gave me any trouble either, in case my bad luck was catching.”

Costis grumbled, but did not repeat his demand that I tell him what Mehter had said. Which was just as well; while I had known his filthy words about my relative value to Costis were not true, I’d been living with them ringing in my ears for the past month, and they did not need to burden Costis as well. 

“So. You didn’t leave the village because you were suspected.”

“No. There was talk of Mede bounty hunters.”

Costis nodded, grim. “And yet you were going to make for the capital city, instead of staying sensibly out of sight.”

I gaped up at him. “How did you know that?”

“You were talking in your sleep. Before you woke the first time.”

“I – yes. I was going to go to Roa City and find a safe place to wait for news of the war.” There was no point in denying it. I was proud of how steady my voice held as I added, “I couldn’t leave the country not knowing what had become of you. Darling, I couldn’t leave you.”

“I told you I was coming back for you.” His voice was a low, dangerous rumble.

All my steadiness vanished. “Costis, any of a hundred things could have kept you from your promise! I know that you meant to, but what if you hadn’t? What if you couldn’t?” My hands were fists in the front of his shirt; after a stunned moment, his hands came to rest on my shoulders, grounding me. “Would you have had me stay here like a rabbit frozen in plain sight until the bounty hunters or the Namreen stumbled over me? No? Then should I have fled to Oncevar with my tail between my legs, resigned to never knowing what happened in Attolia?”

“Kamet,” Costis said, and I could tell that he had said my name several times before I heard him. His grip on my arms was tight. I looked up into his face, breathing hard, and he loosened his hold. With one hand he stroked my face, and not for the first time I felt that he handled me as he would a spooked horse. Not entirely liking the feeling, I glared at him, prepared to hold on to my righteous anger, but felt it vanish like morning mist when he said, “Kamet, I am only wondering if we shouldn’t thank Mehter after all, for selling me the jar that made you sick. If you had left when you meant to, you’d be on a dangerous road alone right now, and I would be here with no idea where you’d gone.”

Abruptly light-headed and without a clear feeling of the ground beneath my feet, I was glad for Costis’s hold on me, and mine on him.

 _Which god had reached down…_ I wondered again, and might have spoken aloud, for Costis looked as suddenly awestruck as I felt.

“Shesmegah,” he murmured after a minute.

“What?”

“’Shesmegah in her pity for Wise Immakuk turned his path, turned it to Ennikar’.”

“That is a very loose interpretation of that line,” I pointed out, feeling the world begin to right itself again.

“So, so, so.” He looked at me very seriously, his eyes glinting in the moonlight. “But as you told me once, a long time ago, they do always save each other.”

“They do,” I agreed, and I reached for him even as he reached for me, sweeping me up in his arms and crushing me to his chest as I kissed him with everything that I had.

I have been small my whole life. As a child in the emperor’s palace it was a blessing. As I grew into a man, jealous of what hard-won respect I could command as my master’s right hand, I had often resented my stature. These days it has become just another fact of my life, something I barely think about or, on rare and wonderful occasions, something I am grateful for. 

With my legs locked around his hips, Costis could hold me up easily. One hand around my back, the other in my hair, he kissed me while I fumbled with the front of his night shirt, pulling the fabric from between our bodies. A few shuffling steps had my back braced against the wall of the hut, Costis groaning into my mouth, and I thought with every shuddering breath that he might drop me, lost to the pleasure I was giving him, but of course he didn’t. He kissed my throat, set his teeth to the corded muscle there and laved his tongue over the spot that turned me wild. With my head tipped back against the wall I sent my voice up to the impossibly bright moon, an untamed prayer of thanks and a promise to savor always what I had been given.

“Gods,” Costis gasped, his cool breath over my damp skin making me shudder in his arms. “You’re not heavy, Kamet, but I can’t—” 

“Down, down,” I interrupted him to agree, my feet already straining for the ground. “Let’s finish this in bed like civilized—”

He interrupted me in turn, and my mouth felt bruised by the time he broke away. Panting heavily, he promised me, with a look that made my blood sing, “Oh, what I want to do with you is hardly civilized.”

It was not. But it was, in the end, immeasurably satisfying. 

I woke the next morning when Costis extricated himself from the ruin of our bed. He suggested I sleep in and, happy to oblige, I did. My entire body ached in the most pleasant way, and I fell into a doze with a smile on my face. I was up and poking around the hut when I heard Costis returning outside, scuffling footsteps and then the sound of a heavy load being dropped to the ground just outside the door. I called out a greeting, and then immediately covered my mouth, struck with the sudden thought that it might not be Costis at all. There was a protracted moment of silence, and then from the other side of the door I heard, “Stay inside, Kamet.” 

I knew his voice. I knew his tone, too, though it had been a long time since I’d heard it. _Danger._

“I’ll be in soon. Don’t come out until I do.”

I breathed out my acquiescence, and heard his footsteps retreat once again. He was gone for almost half an hour, and this time it was the sound of hooves on the hard dirt of the yard that announced his return. By the time he opened the door I had all our belongings ordered up neatly and ready to be packed. I hoped that I was wrong about what that tone of his had meant, but in case I wasn’t, I would be ready to leave in ten minutes.

Costis put down two sets of saddlebags, then closed the door behind him and looked around, squinting in the dim light. Seeing my work, he nodded once and looked me in the eye. “Are you well enough to travel?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’ve just killed a Mede bounty hunter, a bowshot from the spring.”

My skin crawled to think that there’d been a dead man on the other side of the wall from me for the last half hour, but I only nodded. “Could you tell which direction he was coming from?”

“The village.” Costis looked grim. 

He turned to where I had his things laid out. “I’ve got his horse. If you can ride you’ll have my mare, she’s steady and rested now. If I can’t make this man’s beast obey me, I’ll cut him loose when we’re farther away. Here, take this.” He handed me the sword I’d been training with for the past year. He buckled on his own, then began loading up the saddlebags, taking care to keep them balanced, while I saw to our packs. With two horses and two sets of saddlebags we’d be able to carry everything; food, clothes, the most precious of my scrolls. I handed the jars of preserves to Costis and I saw him check each seal carefully before loading them up. Outside, I could hear the horse stamping and realized it was not the placid mare Costis had returned with but the bounty hunter’s animal, and wondered just what he’d meant when he called it a ‘beast’. These were the thoughts with which I occupied myself until it was time to open the door and help Costis carry the dead man inside.


	8. Chapter 8

We rode west. 

We’d left the hut and gone directly to the fall below the spring, where Costis had been cooking when the bounty hunter found him. The meat had charred in the fire while Costis was retrieving the horse and helping me pack up, but it was far from inedible. We quickly wrapped it in oilcloth and added it to the packs. He saddled and loaded up the placid mare while his newly acquired mount danced irritably and rolled his eyes at me while I held his lead. We mounted, and I watched him pull the stallion’s mouth down nearly to his chest to keep him from leaping out from under him. My mare sidled away from them, tossing her head. I gripped her with my knees, feeling those long-disused muscles already protesting, and tried to swallow down my anxiety.

After a moment Costis looked over to me, nodded, and turned us around to put the morning sun to our backs.

We rode all day, my mount following obediently behind Costis’s so that I had to focus on nothing but remining upright. Costis set the pace and before noon I was too tired to lift myself out of the saddle, so whenever we picked up speed into a trot I clung on grimly and endured the painfully jarring ride.

My mind, desperate to focus on anything other than the agonizing present, became fixated on memories of our first flight together. After the _Anet’s Dream_ burned and Costis was improvising every step of the way, how blindly I had followed him, out of my own desperation and lack of viable alternatives. I didn’t ask him where we were going now, either. Attolia lay to the west. But so did the Capital Road. So did the trade road to Chut. Even with my brain rattling inside my skull, I managed to find appreciation for the thought that this time I was following Costis blindly not out of desperation but because my trust in him was so complete that I didn’t need to ask his plan before I threw my lot in with him. 

Costis must have glanced back at some point when I was looking particularly wretched because as the sun began to sink in the sky we kept to a sedate walking pace. He dropped back to ride alongside me, as close as he could get without his beast terrorizing mine, and told me that he expected we’d come upon the Capital Road very soon, and once we saw it and took stock of how trafficked it was, decide what to do. We hadn’t seen another soul since we left the shepherd’s hut, and I was allowing myself to feel tentatively hopeful. We dug food out of our saddle bags and ate as we rode after I admitted to Costis that if we dismounted to eat, I didn’t think I’d ever get back up again.

We were climbing out of yet another a valley, hoping at last to see the road once we reached the crest. The sun had just dropped below the ridge, casting us in shadow, when I realized how far behind me Costis had fallen. I reined in my horse and turned in my saddle to watch him, my mare blowing and seeming happy for the rest. She had been steady beneath me all day but Costis was fighting his beast more and more with every mile. I called out to him and he looked up. I could see that he opened his mouth to reply, but could not make out the expression on his face, only registered that he shouted, “Kamet!” as he sprang into motion again, his horse not obeying him so much as its own wild nature as it surged forward. I swung around as Costis raced by and saw, skylighted on the ridge against the setting sun, a huge silhouette; a warrior with an uplifted spear astride a massive war horse. 

I’d barely freed my own sword from its sheath and begun to urge my mare forward when Costis abruptly pulled up, his unruly beast rearing once before dancing sideways a few steps. Costis put away his sword, and I cautiously made my way towards him while the warrior descended the slope and, no longer silhouetted by the sun, transformed from a terrifying apparition into a quite ordinary farmer seated on a huge ox, his lash braced against his thigh. 

By the time I reigned up beside Costis, I realized that I knew him. His name was Halvar, his land lay in one of the valleys east of the Roa road, and he was a frequent visitor in our village where his sister lived with her family in the house nearest to us. He had his hand raised in a cordial greeting, but I could see his gaze shifting quickly between Costis and me. I wondered, stupidly, if he was noticing that Costis’s hair was the wrong color.

“We make for the capital,” Costis was saying. “We hear there is need soon for strong men there, maybe for scribes,” he added with a nod at me. “There is always money to be made when neighbors go to war.”

I knew that everyone assumed Costis was an Attolian deserter, no matter his stories of growing up on the road all across the Little Peninsula and so calling no country his home. That might have explained Halvar’s look of distaste at the mercenary words, but when Costis nodded significantly at the empty wagon behind his ox, the farmer had to shrug and concede. 

“I have just sold everything I brought to Put at a better price than I could have got even in the capital. I think they would have paid me for ox and cart, too, but then how would I have worked my fields next year?” Halvar shook his head. “I have never seen so many foreigners on the road.” He gestured behind himself, to where I guessed the Roa road lay just out of sight.

“Really?” Costis asked, sounding mildly interested. “Do the armies march already?”

“No, not armies. Men alone or in pairs, on horseback.” He lifted his hands to gesture significantly around his head, and I felt my blood run cold. 

“Well,” Costis said, shrugging. “Perhaps they can tell us how best to find their camp. Journey in your god’s favor, Halvar.” Without another look back at the farmer, or at me, Costis urged his shimmying mount to face the ridge and kicked him into a trot. 

I followed quickly and, trusting to the noise of hooves to cover my voice, called out to Costis before he could reach the ridge. He turned to look at me but didn’t slow, and I repeated Halvar’s gesture in the air around my head. When Costis only frowned, I hissed, “Namreen.” Once again his mount tried to rear and buck as he reigned him in sharply. Even in the fading light I could see that the foam around the beast’s mouth was pink with blood. Costis cursed, swiveling to look over his shoulder. The farmer was making his way steadily downhill and southward, but was nowhere near out of sight. 

“I think the road is just on the other side,” I said. “We can’t risk cresting the hill even to check, we’ll be seen instantly.”

“And if we turn aside and ride down the valley, Halvar will see us.” Costis turned back to look me in the eye before saying grimly, “He heard me call you ‘Kamet’.”

I closed my eyes briefly. We’d been so careful. From the first night onboard ship together still in Attolia’s harbor until the day he left; for over a year he hadn’t once called me anything but ‘Kay’ when we could have been overheard. 

“We’ll have to risk it,” he said after a moment, his eyes once again on Halvar’s retreating back. “We’ll turn and follow this valley to the north. Maybe after dark I can get a look at the road.”

I nodded. Perhaps Halvar was thinking only of reaching his home and a good meal and wouldn’t look over his shoulder to see us veer away from the road and ride in the opposite direction of the city. Costis, seeing my face, shrugged helplessly but with another nod I told him that I was ready to follow his lead.

The moon rose full and bright, but only gave us her light for the first few hours after sunset before disappearing behind the ridge of what I thought must be the Leonyla Peak. We dismounted to lead our horses, and my legs nearly buckled underneath me. We’d been climbing into scrubbily-wooded hills for the last hour and I leaned heavily on my mare as we picked our way around dense clusters of foliage and craggy outcroppings. When we finally stopped I barely even looked around, trusting Costis’s good sense when he told me he thought we would be sheltered on all sides. I pulled our blankets out of the packs while Costis saw to the horses, and was lying down and less that half-conscious by the time he dropped beside me. He made me sit up and eat and drink a little, but then let me sink into blessed oblivion.

“The way I see it, we have two options. We can continue north out of Roa, make for Magyar. The continental powers are sending troops in support of my king; we may find a company to join as they make their way south. Or, we take our chances overland and go west, make for the Leonyla pass ourselves to rendezvous with the allied armies there.”

“Three options,” I said, not moving my arm from where it lay over my face. “We stay right here until we run out of food, and then we fall on our swords together.”

It pleased me that Costis could still laugh, even if I felt that pleasure in a very dim, distant sort of way, almost totally eclipsed by the way my whole body was one dull, throbbing ache. 

Costis, who had been very studiously poring over a map for most of the morning, dropped down beside me and stretched out his legs, propping his chin on one hand to look at me. “My king told me once that he was forced to go on a long trip on horseback, after he’d been locked up without any exercise for months.”

I had also heard the story, though from a different source. “I’ve never had so much sympathy for your absurd king,” I told Costis, peering at him from around my arm. “And I, too, would like to know why didn’t bring a cart.”

Costis laughed again and, ignoring my protests, pulled me close.

It was a good spot that Costis had found for us to shelter in. A hollow depression between a rocky outcropping which hid us from the sight of anyone lower down in the valley and a stand of thick trees and brambles that baffled the wind and the sightlines of anyone higher up. Not that I had any intention of actually falling on my sword, but if we were going to stay anywhere long enough to run out of food, this wasn’t a bad place for it.

At last Costis coaxed me up to stretch my stiff legs and have something to eat. He showed me the map he had spread out over a boulder whose top was nearly flat, and I recognized the style as well as the writing in the margins. 

“Relius?”

Costis nodded. “It’s his most current map of the area.” He pointed to a town whose name had been scratched out and rewritten and I nodded; the news of that renaming had still been fresh when Costis and I came to Roa. 

I ran my finger along the dip of the valley that paralleled the Capital Road, following it until I reached the inky lines of low hills and forests. “If we were right that the road was on the other side of the ridge where we met Halvar, we must be in here somewhere,” I said, tapping the map, leaning closer to see it better, then squinting west into the distance. 

Costis followed my line of sight, nodded, and pointed to the map, where the highest peak on the mountain range seemed to correspond to where we estimated our position to be. “We’re farther north than I thought we’d be,” he said, rubbing at the ungroomed growth of his beard. “Which means we have more open countryside – as well as more unfriendly roads to cross over –” he added, pointing, “between us and Leonyla.”

He chewed his lip and I watched him. This was his decision to make, I could not tell him how best to honor both the duty to his country that was his birthright, and the duty he had taken on in his country’s name towards me. 

“If we _are_ here,” Costis broke the silence at last, “then Chut looks to be less than a day’s ride.” He pointed to the little town whose name had so recently changed to reflect a change in territory lines. 

He looked up at me as though seeking my opinion, though all he’d done was state the obvious. I nodded anyway, and added, “Everyone says the trade road through Chut is very good. We would not be the only travelers.”

He rubbed his chin again, then curled his lip in annoyance. “I wish I could shave. We should change into our good clothes when we get close, and join the road just outside the city. A merchant and a scribe, looking to join a caravan.”

I agreed. “At the very least, we’ll be able to get the lay of the land, purchase food and fill our water skins.”

“And perhaps sell that onerous beast I’ve been riding,” Costis added. I snorted, but shook my head and he conceded with a grimace. Traveling with Costis had made me understand the nature of these kinds of deals; the Mede stallion might be a menace, but trying to sell a valuable horse like that in a small trading town like Chut would bring more attention than coin; far more of the former and less of the latter than he was worth. 

We decided to spend the day resting and set out in the morning. Costis folded his map and went to put it away in its pouch, trading it for a small stack of letters, all addressed to me, which he handed over with an apology. “I forgot all about them, after I found you sick.”

There were three. The top was from Relius, which was gratifying but unsurprising. The other two were addressed in different but equally appalling hands, and I laughed, holding them up to show Costis. Both Pheris’s and Eugenides’s handwriting has improved since I first corresponded with either of them, but it still amused me greatly to see what a similarity such otherwise disparate characters could have. 

“Did you see the little Erondites?” I asked him, opening that letter first. “How is he?”

Costis and I have held differing opinions on the appointment of Erondites’s grandson – who, until that appointment, had been a son of the house of Susa – as heir to that powerful and troublesome family. It is not my country, so I don’t pretend to understand all the intricacies of their baronial system and I haven’t argued with him about it, but I do know that the treatment of unnatural persons like Pheris doesn’t differ much from country to country. I felt very strongly that if Pheris were given a place in the court of Eugenides, and afforded some measure of kindness and respect, it would not matter to which family he belonged; his loyalty would be to his king and his country over all. 

Perhaps Costis’s mind had followed the same track as mine, from Pheris to Erondites to Susa, for before I even unfolded the letter I saw his face fall. “It’s nothing to do with Pheris,” he assured me quickly. “Just – news that will affect my family.” He snorted and shook his head, adding softly, “assuming we survive this war, anyway.”

I refolded the letter and held my hands still in my lap, waiting for him to go on.

“There was…something of a disaster in the court, while I was home. Before you ask, no – I didn’t cause it,” he added with a wry attempt at humor. “The barons…actually, the story properly begins with the ambassador from Pent, who was by all accounts the most insufferable person who ever darkened my queen’s doorway – including the king himself.”

The story Costis told me, of the brazen ambassador kissing the queen in front of all her attendants, the king walking in in the middle of it, the ensuing chase complete with flying daggers – it all sounded like a bad scene from a cheap play. I knew my mouth was hanging open by the end of it, but Costis only nodded. “The barons insisted that the king apologize to the Pents for attempting bodily harm on their ambassador.”

“As would be the only proper course,” I said, offended on their behalf.

“The king refused.”

“Oh, gods.” I rubbed my forehead.

“The barons tried to intimidate him. Told him they could dethrone him if he defied them when they were, for once, a united front. And so he…”

Costis trailed off, his gesture more eloquent than his words. Disbelieving, even as I offered the word, I asked, “He…abdicated?”

Costis shrugged, then nodded. “For all of a day, not even a day. And yet…they seemed to take his point.”

“Which was?”

“That he is Annux.”

“That doesn’t mean that he can do anything he wants.”

“Don’t tell him that.”

I shook my head in disbelief, staggered once again by the actions of this unfathomable king. “And this is the news that will affect your family?”

“Oh. No. Well – in a way. The baron who led this push against the king was Susa. Manipulated by Erondites, the king believes, but Susa was the public face of it. Afterwards, to prove his loyalty to the king, or at least to save face with him, Susa promised to cede to Erondites all of his land that lies above the Pomea.” Costis rubbed his knee with the flat of his palm. “Erondites has a better claim to it than Susa does, but it’s fertile land, wealthy land, and Susa has held on to it tooth and claw all these years. But now, with it changing hands, it means that Erondites will be baron over my family’s farm.”

I grimaced in understanding and reached for him. I knew, from Costis and from palace gossip, that no one envied any who found themselves under the thumb of Erondites. But I also knew, because Costis had told me, that the breaking of that baron’s iron grip was a promise the king had made to his queen on their wedding night.

“All will be well,” Costis said after a moment, squeezing my hand and then indicating the unread letter I still held. “Perhaps old Erondites will fall fighting the enemy he claims is not coming, and my father will end up paying his taxes to the little monster.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, friends, I regret to say that while I have two more chapters outlined, this is the last material that I have actually written and my so-called "real life" and other commitments have kept me from making any progress over the past few weeks. I absolutely will finish this, I'm just not sure when, and have decided not to even think about it until after the holidays. So please subscribe to the story if you're so inclined, comments and kudos are love and much appreciated as inspiration to keep going. Hope to see you back here sometime in January! Be blessed in your endeavors.


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